The Company That Helps Others Spy On Your Phone Has A New Plan: Share That Info With You

Carrier IQ -- that company that builds software to let carriers
and others track what you do on your phone -- has
come up with a new scheme: let the phone owners see what it
sees.

The company is marketing this brainchild as a self-help
application.

It says its new customer service portal, coming next quarter,
will let phone owners figure out why their smartphones are having
technical problems so they can fix those issues themselves.

The company is hoping to entice users into not using one of the
many hack methods turn it off -- and also hoping mobile phone
makers and operators won't dump it.

Carrier IQ got
itself into hot water a few months back when Android
developers started to see it as an app loaded onto smartphones
from Samsung,
HTC,
Nokia,
BlackBerry,
and supposedly Apple. They
noticed that the app was tracking and recording everything on
your phone from the content of your text messages to the web
pages you visit and sending that information off to a third party
like the carrier or the device maker.

So the company has come up with a reason to share the data with
the person it is spying on.

"Industry figures suggest that smartphone users are twice as
likely to call for support as feature phone users, but two-thirds
of smartphone users would prefer self-help tools to calling into
customer care," the company explains.

So would you turn Carrier IQ on -- or buy a phone that has it
installed -- if it let you play tech support for your own phone?